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One day too many
6 comments
I’d NEVER join a book club. It’s too much pressure! They ask you questions and I don’t need to reveal my poor reading comprehension to an unsuspecting public. I talk a pretty good game. Just don’t look under the hood.
A fat raise in the middle of a worldwide recession? Well done, sir.
I like it because it forces me out of my normal reading habits. I’ve come across some excellent books which, left to my own devices, I’d have ignored, because of my prejudices I suppose.
And our group is much more about social chatting and getting civilisedly drunk than trying to emulate a postgraduate seminar in Lit Crit. We spend about ten minutes on the book, then the rest of the evening talking about the first subject that comes into our heads. We drink lots of wine because that makes us clever.
The rise, yes that was out of the blue. It’s just a very short term contract but I’m not going to argue with anyone who wants to double my wages.
“with which middlebrow literature by female authors is often illustrated”
as opposed to the up your guns macho bull**** shots which adorn middlebrow literature by male authors?
Such as One Day (altho’ it pretends to be all feministy and touchy feely), but as Catherine clement said – for the story to have power, the woman has to die.
Oops, spoiler.
But the denouement of One Day made me almost physically sick. If a woman author wrote something as self-indulgent and aspirational as One Day, she’d be laughed out of the country, not made into a millionaire.
Really? Does she die? I’m glad I didn’t get that far. When a man writes about women in clichés he “understands the female condition". When a woman does the same thing, it’s chick lit.
One Day is successful because people chortle to themselves about the kind of life they would liked to have had, thinking to themselves “that could have been me", fantasising themselves into the caricature cokehead or unappreciated intellectual. They recognise themselves in stereotypes through language which doesn’t make them think about themselves, and that very lack of reflection gives them pleasure.
I did *not* like One Day but J’s boss had lent it so had to get through it. Dec’ a total cock and Emma’s a sap. Awkwardly, both J and my mum loved it.
Hope the suggestions helped, although if Mary-Ann lives in Leicester she’ll probably have better haunts than me!
Thank you H, I will file your suggestions away in case she starts shilly-shallying. “I know,” I will say, masterfully, making her quiver with submission and admiration, “we’ll go to Prezzo".
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